


circus elephants

by isawet (orphan_account)



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Kidfic, M/M, Original Female Character - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 02:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/isawet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint leaves the circus at 18, but not before unknowingly fathering a child. Ten years later the mother dies and the girl arrives at his doorstep.</p><p>Coulson/Clint being bamf dads, kidfic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	circus elephants

Catherine’s mother used to tell her stories about her father, a man with smiling eyes and rough fingers and arms that used to swing her up and around. She doesn’t tell Catherine his name, or even what colour his hair was, how tall he was, the darkness of his skin. Instead she tells Catherine of the time he jumped onto a panicking elephant and calmed it by murmuring into its ear, the time he strapped her mother to his back and climbed the tent pole until they perched at the very top and drank wine straight from the bottle, watching the people below them scurry like ants.

//

When she is five she goes to a neighbour’s birthday party and comes back with a party favour, a plastic bow with a cheap foam arrows that shoot no farther than two feet. She has just recently seen the Disney film Robin Hood, and she finds a seagull feather by the side of the road, tucks it behind her ear and shouts things like _for Nottingham_ and _King Richard_ , and jumps from the ratty sofa to half crooked table shooting her arrows at the refrigerator until her mother comes home from work, takes one look at Catherine standing on a kitchen table with her bow drawn back by her ear and bursts into tears.

She’s inconsolable, and she goes to her room and shuts the door and doesn’t come out for the rest of the night, even though Catherine is hungry and still not allowed into the refrigerator and has to sleep curled up on the sofa that is stained a funny brown colour and smells like the cheese they serve at school lunch.

She comes out in the morning and wakes Catherine with a hug and a kiss to her temple and makes pancakes in a silent apology, even waits with Catherine by the bus stop even though she usually doesn’t have the time, and Catherine preens under the attention.

When she gets home she looks into every nook and cranny for her bow and arrow, but she never does see it again.

//

Catherine’s mother dies when she is ten, mugged and murdered on her way home from pulling a double shift because Catherine needs a new winter coat and boots without holes in the heels. A woman in an ill-fitting pantsuit is waiting in the principal’s office when Catherine is pulled out of class, and she speaks half-heartedly about accidents and extended family until Catherine stops shrugging and staring at the floor with her lip between her teeth.

The woman drives them home, and gives Catherine a black kitchen trashbag. Catherine goes into the bottom drawer of their single dresser and pulls out her clothes, faded tops and jeans with mended rips in the knees, folds them in sloppy mimicry of how her mother used to do it and packs the bag full. When it’s almost full she hesitates, and then pulls open her mother’s drawer and takes her mother’s pajama tops, her running shirts, her scarves and her sweatshirts until the trashbag bulges and the woman appears at the doorway. “That’s enough.”

“Okay,” Catherine says, and the woman helps her carry the bag to the car.

 

The funeral is very quiet, and very lonely. There’s a priest Catherine doesn’t know and the woman in the pantsuit, and one other person, a man in a pressed black suit and matching tie, with thin brown hair.

“Hello,” she says to him, and the priest stops halfway through a sentence Catherine wasn’t really listening to. The man regards her seriously and offers her his hand.

“Phil,” he says, and she shakes it in the way she’s seen adults do.

“Catherine,” she says.

“I know,” Phil says, and doesn’t speak again. Catherine stays next to him and listens to the priest as he starts to pray, and her eyes get wetter and wetter until she’s breathing in little gasping hitches. A smooth dry hand slips into hers, and she stands in very green grass under a very blue sky watching her mother’s body disappear into the earth, without once letting go of her grip on Phil’s hand.

//

Phil takes her to a building surrounded by metal fences and coiled wires, and men with guns peer into the car and blink at her. He takes her hand when they park and then walk down long white hallways until they get a cold grey room with metal tables.

“I’m scared,” Catherine whispers, and Phil smiles at her.

“There’s no reason to be scared,” he says, and shrugs off his jacket to hang around her shoulders. The door behind him creaks open and another man comes through, hesitant and moving almost silently. “I’ll leave you two alone,” Phil says, and leaves. Catherine curls a little tighter into his jacket.

“Hi,” the man says, very quietly. 

“Hi,” Catherine says.

“My name,” the man says, stumbling over his words, “my name is Clint. Do you know who I am?”

Catherine stares at him, her fingers twisting in the sleeves of Phil’s jacket. “You’re Clint,” she parrots, and he frowns.

“I--” he says, stopping. He starts again. “I’m your father.”

“Oh,” Catherine says. She picks at a thread in her jeans and stares at the floor. Clint sits in one of the chairs next to the table and she shuffles over to the other one, sliding into it carefully. She looks at his fingers splayed out on the metal tabletop and he breaths like he’s trying to decide whether or not to start talking.

“Did you--” Catherine falters, “did you really jump off a roof onto an elephant?”

Clint starts. “Yes. I did. A long time ago, I almost forgot about that.”

Catherine bites her lip. “Are you going to send me away?”

“No,” Clint says finally, “I won’t send you away.”

//

Catherine is eleven when she finally starts calling Clint by his first name, and even then it’s awkward, stilted. She lives in a small apartment on a military base and goes to the small military school and walks home past the base grocery store and the base gas station and has to count the doorways on her street because they’re all shaped the same and the numbers have long since wore off.

Clint comes home for dinner every night, with two trays covered in saran wrap to heat in the microwave, and he checks on her during the night when he thinks she’s asleep, she can see the shadow across her door from the light in the hall, hear the creak of the floor as he pauses in her doorway.

Catherine’s favourite days are when Phil visits, because even though he checks her homework before anything else he’s also willing to play cards with her, teaches her poker, teaches her rummy. He also has hissing arguments with Clint in the kitchen, conversations Catherine strains to hear because he hardly even changes his tone when he talks to her.

Clint starts sticking around in the mornings, makes her lunch to take to school, is waiting for her when school lets out to walk her home. He tells her stories about her mother, about the time her mother walked the tightrope even though they hadn’t set up the safety net yet, the time her mother stood full upright on a horse as it galloped through the sandy circle.

//

Catherine turns twelve and Clint has an awful, stinted, emotionally stunted conversation with her that she figures out later is him trying to tell her that he and Clint have started dating. All she knows at the time is that Clint smiles more, Phil is around more often. She likes it.

They go to the zoo together and Clint buys her ice cream shaped like a panda and Phil buys her a monkey hat at they hold her hands while they walk through the reptile building. They go to the park and Phil and Clint sit very close to each other on the blanket while Catherine eats macaroni and cheese with cut up hot dogs and watches the ducks drift lazily across the lake.

She comes home from school on Mother’s Day and locks herself in the bathroom. Clint picks the lock in less than thirty seconds and Phil sits on the closed toilet lid like it’s a leather office chair until she finishes crying and her breath evens out. They go for Chinese and Clint teaches her how to use chopsticks, her little fingers slipping on the wood.

//

Catherine calls Phil ‘Dad’ for the first time when she is thirteen, sitting at the kitchen table and asking a question about pre-algebra. Clint is stirring tomato pasta by the stove, and he goes completely, utterly still even as Phil’s eyes go slightly wider than normal and Catherine slaps a hand over her mouth. The only sound is the soft bubbling in the pot.

Clint takes a deep, even breath and starts stirring again. Catherine stares at Phil and he smiles quietly at her.

 

That weekend Clint raps on her bedroom door and takes her deeper into the base than they usually go. They end up in the shooting range, and Clint adjusts the ear protection on her face with a fond smile she usually sees directed at Phil, slides on the plastic eye glasses with the utmost care for her hair.

He clears his throat. “Never point a gun at anything--or anyone--you’re not planning on shooting. Repeat it.”

 

Later, when they’re in the car and Catherine’s fingers are smarting from pushing the bullets, one by one into the clip, Clint pulls to the side of the road and turns the quiet rumble of the car off. 

“I’m never going to be,” he says. “I’m never going to be that guy for you. The guy that Phil can be for you.”

“A dad,” Catherine says, and Clint halfsmiles. 

“I’ll do my best,” he says, “to be--what I can be for you.”

Catherine reaches across the gearshift and takes her father’s hand. “You do okay,” she says, and they hold hands all the way home.

//

Catherine meets Natasha Romanov three months after her fourteenth birthday. She lets herself in her front door after school, waving at a friend walking by, and walks into the kitchen to find a redheaded woman leaning against the wall. Catherine jumps, and the woman tilts her head to one side, then the other, and she looks like an alien, like someone who’s copying the human interaction she’s seen other people do.

The living room window crashes and her father comes through it, shaking the glass off his skin and out of his hair. “Go to your room,” he orders, and Catherine runs.

She slams her door shut and locks it with shaking hands before pressing her ear to it and trying to decide if she should give thanks or curse the thin walls and lack of reinforced doors.

“I wasn’t going to hurt her,” the woman’s voice is muffled, but it’s as even and emotionless as her face was and Catherine shudders. Phil’s voice is bland, but she’s never doubted that he cares for her, cares for Clint.

“You can’t,” Clint says, “you can’t come here, Tasha.”

“I just wanted to know what you were so obviously hiding from me.”

“This is my _daughter_ ,” Clint says, and then there are general noises, the shifting of weight and rustling of clothes.

“I understand.” The floor creaks down the hallway to her room and Catherine throws herself across the room onto her bed.

“Hey,” Clint says. “it’s okay--” Catherine throws herself at him, and he catches her. “hey, hey. Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Catherine says through tears, and Clint smoothes a hand over her hair.

“I’ll call Phil,” he promises, and they sit on the couch, his arm around her shoulders, until he gets home.

 

Two weeks later Catherine crosses the street outside her school and finds that red headed woman leaning against a car parked near the deli, her arms folded across her chest and her hair in perfect ringlet curls.

“Clint’s gonna be pissed,” Catherine says.

The woman shrugs. “Some things can’t be helped. My name is Natasha Romanov.”

“Catherine,” Catherine answers politely.

“I owe your father a debt,” Natasha says. “I won’t allow harm to come to you, if I can prevent it.”

Catherine tries to figure out if she’s talking about Phil or Clint. “... Okay.”

“Good,” Natasha says, and slips sunglasses over her eyes. “Hopefully we’ll never see each other again.”

//

Catherine goes on a first date six months after the attack on New York and the formation of the Avengers, two months after she turns fifteen.

“Hm,” Phil says when she tells him, and turns the page in the newspaper he’s reading.

“He will pick you up,” Clint says, and Catherine blows out a sigh. She likes living in the Avenger’s mansion, likes having coffee in the morning with Pepper, likes how big her room is and the way Tony winks at her. She especially likes the way she has tutors instead of school.

“He’s homeschooled too, it’ll be fine,” she says.

“He will pick you up,” Phil echoes and Catherine rolls her eyes. 

“Fine,” she huffs, and digs in a pocket for her phone.

 

James is shorter than her, with thick black hair that sticks every which way and a shy smile that only shows a little teeth. He’s brave enough to walk, surrounded by SHIELD agents, to the front door of the Avenger’s mansion and rap smartly, brave enough to sit in the living room with Clint and Phil staring him down while Tony snickers in the corner.

“Cute,” Natasha says when Catherine passes her in the corridor. Catherine flushes and mumbles something, walks a bit faster.

“Hey,” James says, and stands to press a kiss to her cheek. Catherine blushes again, and Clint and Phil continue to stare, impassive.

“I’ll see you,” Catherine says to them, and laces her fingers with James’.

Phil picks up his newspaper again. “Happy will drive you.”

“Daaaad,” Catherine whines, and Tony outright laughs.

“Happy will drive you,” Phil says again, and by the door Happy waves awkwardly.

 

“Your family is crazy, huh?” James asks in the back of the limo, smiling softly. His hand cradles her jaw, and Happy wordlessly rolls up the partition.

“Yeah,” Catherine says, leaning in for a kiss. Her heart flutters a little and she smiles, their fingers tangled together. “I’m lucky.”

**Author's Note:**

> /o/


End file.
